G04 Law Principle

Which do you think is more likely?

Hold accountable anyone defying social norms.

OR

Better understand why some violations of norms are better than kneejerk compliance.

Anankelogy

The “law” does not exist to apply to every specific need you have. No law requires you to breathe, or dictates you must first show appreciation for others before you expect their appreciation of you, or obliges you to sleep laying down instead of standing up.

Laws apply only to general situations. Covering too many details risks making a law inapplicable or unenforceable.

No law requires you to put your keys somewhere you can remember. No law requires you to submit an itinerary to local authorities stating what you specifically expect you’ll be doing every minute of next Tuesday. No law requires you to know exactly when you’ll be using the restroom in the course of the next several days. No law requires you to be healthier a year from now.

Anankelogy recognizes how laws must remain vague, impersonal, and adversarial.

• Laws are kept vagueto apply to almost any situation. Which risks being too general to apply to you and your specific needs.

• Laws are kept impersonalto avoid partiality. Which risks alienating you and your specific needs.

• Laws are kept adversarialin their enforcement to punish offenders. Which risks premature hostility toward you and your specific needs.

Anankelogy’s answer to these built-in limits of law is need-response.

Need-response

Need-responseprioritizes our inflexible needs over our flexible laws. The needs came first. And laws can never keep up with our every need. Nor should they.

As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn pointed out: “I have spent all my life under a Communist regime and I will tell you that a society without any objective legal scale is a terrible one indeed. But a society with no other scale but the legal one is also less than worthy of [humanity]. A society based on the letter of the law and never reaching anything higher fails to take advantage of the full range of human possibilities.”

In other words, legalism impedes human flourishing. The opposite extreme of lawlessness is legalistic tyranny, which ironically hinders your capacity to faithfully oblige every rule.

Reactive Problem

Anankelogy identifies this excessive role of rules as toxic legalism. You either respond effectively to needs or settle for legalistic norms…

• to avoid dealing with people’s specific needs with comforting generalities,

• to ease discomfort of vulnerably relating to messy needs, and then

• expect established norms to provide an easier path to easing the pain of our unmet needs.

Motivated reasoning biases legalists to preserve the familiar yet stifling status quo. To maintain this easier path, legalists tend to resist…

• any belief-disturbing nuance,

• discomforting engagement, and then

• prematurely oppose others outside of their norms of legally privileged pain avoidance.

In short, norm-compliant legalists frequently resist those with the wisdom and answer to remove causes of pain. They’re often trapped in a zone of mounting pain, and dare not rock the boat lest they risk more pain.

Such legalists easily slide into the creeping normalcyof managing their gradually increasing load of emotional pain. By not recognizing the reported needs behind these uncomfortable emotions, they ironically suffer more emotional pain as those unmet needs painfully insist on some attention.

But the more they overlook the needs that their pain exists to report, the more they’re prone to fall back into their managed levels of pain. Legalists tend to resist full wellness. The pain required easily triggers discomfort they feel they must avoid.

To them, good is defined generally as avoiding pain. Painful wellness efforts seem bad. They often react to painful norm-transgressing efforts to fully resolve needs.

Responsive Solution

While no one sits above the law, no law sits above the needs for which they exist to serve. You cannot easily change your inflexible needs to fit flexible laws. The more can directly resolve needs, the less dependent on norms or authority.

Need-response holds us to a higher standard than mere legal compliance: resolving needs to improve measurable wellness outcomes. Such as reducing anxiety and depression. And enabling more our potential to be reached.

Need-response can inspire us to stretch our comfort zone, to equip us to resolve more needs. So we can courageously endure the discomfort of stepping outside of comforting norms.

Instead of selfishly trying to avoid the mounting pain of our unresolved needs, need-response incentivizes us to honor each other’s needs as our own. The more we step outside of ourselves to meaningfully help others to resolve their needs, the more empowered they are to honor our needs.

You can call this love.

Responding to your needs

How does this principle speak to your experience of needs? Post in our Engagement forum your thoughtful response to one of these:

• How can we tell the difference between selfish norm-violating and responsive norm-violating?

• What do you say about those who get punished by legalists for trying to resolve more needs?

• How can we measure legalist efforts and responsive wellness efforts?

• How can you resist the government authorities who enforcing stiflingly anti-wellness norms?

Instead of selecting one of these, post your own engagement feedback about your experience with the subject of this principle. Remember the aim is to improve our responsiveness to each other’s needs, toward their full resolution. If you’re new at posting here, first check the guide below.